Designing the world’s most beautiful news caster

I want to share a little secret on how we develop our news casters for News Anchor. When we first develop the news caster, we designed it according to the popular 2D Japanese anime, we called the guy ‘Alex’ after the text to speech voice from Mac. Apparently he didn’t sell out, some comments about him were ‘hideous’, ‘crappy’, ‘scooby do like’, and it didn’t help the sales at all. It broke my heart, but we realized, we need to change the character according to the market’s taste

oldAlex-2011-03-26-15-02.jpg

So on our next version, we took great effort to change the design totally, we started with a female, called ‘Vicky’ named after, you guessed it, the text to speech voice from Mac called ‘Vicky’. She is supposed to be a 3D American comic character. After we finished designing her, we thought she was totally awesome. When we put her to the judgement to a panel of men, which are our friends, somehow they were not impressed. There seems to be something which were wrong in her. Is it the eyes, the neck, or the face they couldn’t agree.

victoriaoldcomparewithmask-2011-03-26-15-02.png

Then one of our friends suggested to map Vicky’s face according to the Golden ratio proportions. An old belief from the ancient Greeks, which hold everything of beauty in this world must adhere to the Golden ratio proportion. We started to spot what were the problems with her proportions and make adjustments. Vicky started to look more natural and real. We were also able to see that we designed the neck too long. It amazed me. In the end, we were able to please 50% of our male friends, they think she is attractive, the rest of the group think she is more natural, but they have their own personal preferences on what constitute the perfect woman, some prefer Chinese, some prefer a voluptuous woman. I don’t think we can please everyone’s personal taste, so we decided on our final design is “it”.
compare_new_vicky-2011-03-26-15-02.png
The golden ratio didn’t stop there, later on we decided to create a revamped Alex. Let me tell you my first design was totally disgusted by Adib, he thinks the character is not manly enough, well, I think he looks just like Brad Pitt. But after looking at the character for a while, he does appear to lack the brashness which a man normally has. It’s quite strange, because I already designed the face according to the golden ratio. I had to darken his skin tone, darken his hair, lose his rosy cheeks and lips, shorten his hair and added an adam’s apple. I had to deviate the golden ratio a bit by stretching his jaw a little bit. The end product was deemed manly enough, but somehow nobody in particular thinks Alex is attractive, except for my mom. Adib’s mom thinks his son is a lot more attractive :D.

compare_alex-2011-03-26-15-02.png

Because the last news caster I made is a cat, the golden ratio could not be applied. Personally I think the cat is adorable, with its funny tail curling around. But apparently people think it’s a bit ridiculous, when we put the cat as the main screen shot in the AppStore, we saw our sales dropped.

kitty_latest-2011-03-26-15-02.png

So far Vicky is the best face we put in the AppStore, we really see how sales goes up when we put her face forward. Of course, if you have a better idea on the appearance of your news caster, you are more than welcome to share it with us.

theNews-2011-03-26-15-02.png


Subscribe

Get articles like this sent to your inbox as soon as they are published.

* indicates required

Unsubscribe any time and we won't share your details with third parties.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,